The invention relates to the installation of sound converters in a sound guide, in particular for speakers, preferably for speaker boxes, and is characterized in that the transmission of solid-borne sound from the sound converters to the sound guide is prevented.
The invention pertains in particular to speaker boxes for the highquality transmission of music, such as those which are conventional in professional use and in consumer electronics.
The object of the invention is to improve the quality of reproduction of speaker boxes by eliminating interfering vibrations in the sound guide and housing.
As is known, the purpose of speaker boxes is to convert electrical signals into acoustic ones according to given quality criteria. One of these criteria is the degree of distortion which arises during transmission. To achieve minimum distortion, the sound guide and housing of a speaker box must not themselves function as sources of sound, i.e., they must not be subject to excitation to resonance by vibrations generated by the sound converter.
The concept "sound guide" as used here and hereafter will be understood very generally to mean a device to match the sound converter acoustically to the environment at wavelengths longer than that of its diaphragm. Examples of this are: sound panel, trumpet, closed box, etc. There is no housing with the sound panel, while sound guide and housing are one and the same in the closed box.
The conventional technology for attaining this object consists in providing the sound guide and housing with sufficiently thick walls, adding braces and reinforcements, and/or selecting a material which has high internal damping. Examples of this are speaker boxes made of concrete, marble, ceramic, plexiglass, and aluminum. Multi-layered housings on the sandwich principle, whose inner layer is a highly damping material, such as, for example, sand, are also known.
A disadvantage of all these designs is that the amount of material and labor required is relatively high, engendering correspondingly high costs, and ultimately resulting in heavy, awkward speaker boxes. These advantages of the invention increase with the size of the speaker box and/or the required amount of distortion-free sound reproduction. On the other hand, if the sound guide is not rigid enough, or if the sound converter is connected to the sound guide via an attenuating material, a worsening of pulse behavior and efficiency result.